Boehner's losing streak

Just in the past two weeks, nearly 100 Republicans said they’d vote against two different versions of Boehner’s signature highway bill — one that covers five years and another that was merely 18 months.

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On Thursday, Boehner was forced to admit that the “current plan” is to bring up the Senate bill or “something like it.” Meaning he will be hard up to find enough members to support his vision for more road building coupled with expanded oil drilling.

House Republicans have twice handed President Barack Obama victory by passing his payroll tax holiday, which the GOP alternated between opposing and supporting. The second time the House took up the bill, Boehner and other Republican leaders caved to Democratic demands and didn’t pay for it, undermining their months-long argument that Democrats were hurting the Social Security program.

Then there was the supercommittee debacle last fall. Boehner opposed the creation of the elite bicameral panel in discussions with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), but it was created anyway and ended up failing. As a result, there will be deep cuts to entitlement programs — something that was supposed to punish Democrats, who now seem to welcome those trims. Hundreds of billions are now being cut from military spending, which is chafing hawkish House Republicans.

Now, the GOP’s five-year highway bill has been reworked, rethought and pulled off the floor so many times that Republicans have lost track which bill leadership is whipping.

If the five-year bill isn’t salvaged, the House will most likely be forced to take up a short-term deal that they’ve all said is harmful to business certainty.

The big Republican success of recent months — the Jobs Act — devolved into a skirmish over who deserves the credit for what bill on the heels of accusations that leadership snatched Rep. David Schweikert’s (R-Ariz.) bill to give it to his primary opponent, Rep. Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.). A version of the bill did pass on Thursday, but the effort was generally led by Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.).